Causal Relations and Explanatory Strategies in Physics

Many philosophers now regard causal approaches to explanation as highly promising, even in physics. This is due in large part to James Woodward's influential argument that a wide variety of scientific explanations are causal, based on his interventionist approach to causation. This article argues that some derivations describing causal relations and satisfying Woodward's criteria for causal explanation fail to be explanatory. Further, causal relations are unnecessary for a range of explanations, widespread in physics, involving highly idealized models. These constitute significant limitations on the scope of causal explanation. We have good reason to doubt that causal explanation is as widespread or important in physics as Woodward and other proponents maintain.     

Be Fair,Your Employees Are Watching: A Relational Response Model of External Third‐Party Justice

There is growing theoretical recognition in the organizational justice literature that an organization's treatment of external parties (such as patients, community members, customers, and the general public) shapes its own employees’ attitudes and behavior toward it. However, the emerging third‐party justice literature has an inward focus, emphasizing perceptions of the treatment of other insiders (e.g., coworkers or team members). This inward focus overlooks meaningful “outward” employee concerns relating to how organizations treat external parties. We propose a relational response model to advance the third‐party justice literature asserting that the organization's fair treatment of external parties sends important relational signals to employees that shape their social exchange perceptions toward their employer. Supporting this proposition, in two multisource studies in separate healthcare organizations we found that patient‐directed justice had indirect effects on supervisory cooperative behavior ratings through organizational trust and organizational identification.     

Luck,Knowledge, and “Mere” Coincidence

There are good reasons for pursuing a theory of knowledge by way of understanding the connection between knowledge and luck. Not surprisingly, then, there has been a burgeoning of interest in “luck theories” of knowledge as well as in theories of luck in general. Unfortunately, “luck” proves to be as recalcitrant an analysandum as “knows.” While it is well worth pursuing a general theory of luck despite these difficulties, our theory of knowledge might be made more manageable if we could find a more restricted notion that captured the core phenomena of luck that are relevant to whether or not someone knows. This essay makes the attempt to delineate such a notion, called “mere coincidence.”     

Minimizing indexicality

I critically examine Cappelen and Lepore’s definition of and tests for indexicality, and refine them to improve their adequacy. Indexicals cannot be defined as expressions with different referents in different contexts unless linguistic meaning and circumstances of evaluation are held constant. I show that despite Cappelen and Lepore’s claim that there are only a handful of indexical expressions, their “basic set” includes a number of large and open classes, and generates an infinity of indexical phrases. And while the tests can be used effectively to combat contextualism concerning ‘knows’ and ‘actual,’ many expressions not in their basic set test positive for indexicality, including quantifier nouns, weather reports, and comparative adjectives. I rebut their claim that context-shifting arguments inevitably lead to radical contextualism, and that if there were any indexicals beyond their basic set, communication would be impossible.     

Resign or carry-on? District and principal leadership as drivers of change in teacher turnover intentions during the COVID-19 crisis: A latent growth model examination

During the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers in the United States, an already at-risk occupation group, experienced new work-related stressors, safety concerns, and work-life challenges, magnifying on-going retention concerns. Integrating the crisis management literature with the unfolding model of turnover, we theorize that leader actions trigger initial employee responses but also set the stage for on-going crisis response that influence changes in teachers' turnover intentions. We apply latent growth curve modelling to test our hypotheses based on a sample of 617 K-12 teachers using nine waves of data, including a baseline survey at the start of the 2020–2021 school year and eight follow-up surveys (2-week lags) through the Fall 2020 semester. In terms of overall adaptation, teachers on average, experienced an increase in work-life balance and a decrease in turnover intentions over the course of the semester. Results also suggest that district and school leadership provide unique and complementary resources, but leader behaviours that shape initial crisis responses do not similarly affect employee responses during crisis, contrary to theory. Instead, teachers' adaptive crisis response trajectories were triggered by continued resource provision over the semester; increasing provision of valued resources (i.e., continued refinement of safety practices) and improvements in work-life balance prevented turnover intentions from spiralling throughout the crisis. Crisis management theory and research should continue to incorporate temporal dynamics and identify factors that contribute to crisis response trajectories, using designs and analyses that allow for examination as crises unfold in real time.     

Antecedents and outcomes of organizational support for development: the critical role of career opportunities

This study examines antecedents and behavioral outcomes of employees' perceptions of organizational support for development. We first propose that employees' past participation in formal developmental activities and experience with developmental relationships positively relate to their perceptions of organizational support for development. We then propose that perceived career opportunity within the organization moderates the relationship between organizational support for development and employee performance and turnover. Using a sample of 264 exempt-level employees and their supervisors, we found that participation in training classes, leader-member exchange, and career mentoring were each positively related to employees' perceptions of organizational support for development. We also found support for the moderator hypotheses. Specifically, development support positively related to job performance, but only when perceived career opportunity within the organization was high. Further, development support was associated with reduced voluntary turnover when perceived career opportunity was high, but it was associated with increased turnover when perceived career opportunity was low. Our study demonstrates that social exchange and career motivation theory work together to explain when and how employees' perceptions of organizational support for development relate to turnover and job performance.     

Confronting Many‐Many Problems: Attention and Agentive Control

I argue that when perception plays a guiding role in intentional bodily action, it is a necessary part of that action. The argument begins with a challenge that necessarily arises for embodied agents, what I call the Many‐Many Problem. The Problem is named after its most common case where agents face too many perceptual inputs and too many possible behavioral outputs. Action requires a solution to the Many‐Many Problem by selection of a specific linkage between input and output. In bodily action the agent perceptually selects, and in this way perceptually attends to, relevant information so as to guide the execution of specific movements. Since perceptual attention is a necessary part of solving the Many‐Many Problem, it is a necessary part of bodily action. Indeed, the process of implementing a solution to the Many‐Many Problem, as constrained by the agent's motivational state, just is the agent's performing an intentional bodily action in the relevant way.